Take Our Words Back

Words are miraculous, tricky things.

They slide into us, settle there, and begin to move us before we have decided what they mean. Put the one word beside the right word and you can make a person mistake control for care, obedience for love, silence for peace.

Words are programs. A single word can carry an entire culture. It can break you open, build you up, or send your body moving before your mind has caught up.

Some words are programmed so deeply into us that they become movements of their own.

Love. Honor. Cherish. Protect. Provide.

Entire worlds live inside them.

My father—the violent Republican racist and pedophile—used those words to name what he was doing to us. He called raping my brothers “loving” them. He called beating us “protecting” us. He called controlling my mother “honoring” her. He called abusing us and locking us in our rooms “providing” for us.

That is what abusers do with language. They take a word that should comfort you and use it to make you doubt the wound it caused.

MAGA has done the same thing to the public meaning of care. It has taken words from the language of safety and filled them with control.

When patriarchal men say they want to protect women, “protect” no longer means keep safe. It means manage us. Control our time. Restrict our choices. Keep us pure, contained, and untainted by other men. It means deciding where we can go, what we can know, what we can do with our bodies, and who is allowed to touch our lives.

Protect means control.

Protect means confinement.

Protect means ownership.

Protect means abuse.

They want to destroy anything that makes us strong because strength is the thing they cannot control. They call the cage protection so they can punish us for trying to leave it.

Then they take the words that once helped us recognize one another and turn them into weapons.

Woke becomes an accusation.

Empathy becomes a demand for submission.

Tolerance becomes permission to taunt the vulnerable.

Love becomes ownership.

Joy becomes the pleasure of watching someone weaker suffer.

The words are still there. Their meanings have been occupied.

This is why language matters. If they can rename control as protection, cruelty as strength, domination as order, and suffering as virtue, they can make people participate in their own imprisonment while believing they are being cared for.

Fascism often arrives wearing the language of protection.

Our work is to take the words back.

Rework their meanings into existence through our actions.

Love is not ownership.

Honor is not obedience.

Protection is not imprisonment.

Provision is not a debt.

Empathy is not surrender.

Tolerance is not permission to harm.

Joy is not another person’s pain.

Words are programs.

That means they can be rewritten.

We can write them back into the world. We can weave a world of virtue.